Thursday, February 23, 1995

Q&A Camille Paglia: Dualities

HB: The first I knew of your work was the piece you did for
Harper's with Neil Postman on media.

CP: The cover story in '91.

HB: In which you manage to link together Santeria and Mt.
Sinai in a single paragraph.

CP: Right. The libel is abroad that Paglia got to be famous
because she attacks women. In point of fact one of the reasons I got famous is
because of that story simultaneous with a New York Magazine cover story. Feminism
is hardly mentioned in the Harper's piece, which was about contemporary
culture, completely devoid of the sex wars.

HB: Why so much resentment of your celebrity?

CP: This is a very PC place. The feminist establishment here
is one of the most powerful in the country, comparable to the Village Voice
group in New York, and the pockets of intense PC feminism in Princeton, Santa
Cruz, Berkeley. When I came on the scene five years ago, it was like dealing
with Stalinists or Christian fundamentalists.

They had the truth. The agenda was all worked out. There
were code words like "patriarchy," the "male gaze,"
"oppression," and so on. I upset the apple cart. People forget that
for a year after the publication of "Sexual Personae" (1990) I was
completely unknown. The book was simply selling and selling with no publicity
from Yale Press. Then all of a sudden I'm in the papers with a Madonna piece
for the New York Times, followed by a piece on date rape.

These women say, "Oh if she weren't that way, I could
take her seriously." But no one knew who Camille Paglia was for that year.
No one had any idea what I looked like, talked like, or anything about my
personality So the resistance of the feminist establishment is not to me but to
my ideas. They could not take in my ideas. There was, for instance, the
feminist faculty member at Yale who marched into one of the New Haven
bookstores with her graduate students to return "Sexual Personae" on
the grounds that it was incorrect -- this after reading half of a chapter and
before I was on the scene as a personality.

You have to accept it was a serious situation. There was a
total closing down of free thought and free speech in feminism. It was at a
total dead-end. No one talked to them. They were off in a ghetto, with their own
lucrative programs and job give-aways.

I gave them the bad news -- "Guess what. You haven't
been talking to anybody. There's been no real dialogue. You're mediocrities.
Everyone around you says it. You haven't heard it because no one says it to you
directly."

HB: Arguments flared up about you all the time, lots of them
with people who had never read you.

CP: To criticize the feminist establishment was to be
anti-feminist. I'm the one who broke the spell. It's possible to critique
feminist ideology and the feminist establishment and still be true to feminist
principles. When you criticize the Catholic hierarchy or doctrine you can still
be Catholic. The point is a profound anti-intellectualism has settled over the
culture.

HB: Your celebrity comes at around the same time as Robert
Bly's. Both of you were trying to redefine or reassert the value of
masculinity.

CP: Americans totally ignored the similarity but foreigners
always brought up Robert Bly to me. The feminists would say, "She would be
happy to learn she has been compared to Robert Bly." I would say, excuse
me, Robert Bly is going back through the history of his gender and I'm doing
the same thing for mine. We are exactly parallel phenomena. The feminists would
sneer: "Oh, this man going off into the woods and beating drums."
Well excuse me, I'm a fan of rock. What could be more sixties, what could be
more elemental than going out to nature and building a fire under the stars and
getting your body rhythms in sync with natural rhythms?

There should have immediately been articles written in
America -- this is how stupid things are right now -- exploring how Robert Bly
and I come out of the same element of the sixties.

HB: "Sexual Personae" melts down departments. It
blurs genre, it throws together different areas of learning.

CP: It's the sixties vision. It got lost.

HB: It's a kind of a druggy book, but according to
"Vamps and Tramps" you didn't take drugs.

CP: It's a psychedelic book. I like to call my style
psychedelic criticism. I loved the art, you know, Richard Avedon's portrait of
the four Beatles and the wonderful dayglo rock posters from San Francisco. The
San Francisco electric acid rock style -- that is my style. The great searing
sounds of the Jefferson Airplane lead guitar -- eeeeaaaaaoooo -- and then
you get the reverb, there's a lot of reverb in acid rock. That's my style, and
that's the vision of the universe I want to establish in volume two of
"Sexual Personae" .

The psychedelic thing has dwindled to the tie-died
tee-shirts worn by Dead fans. It was much more than that. It had to do with
opening up your perception of the universe. It was a profoundly revolutionary,
hallucinatory, and mystic way of seeing. The problem was, people turned their
backs on society.

There was a split, a breakdown, total nervous breakdown at
the end of the sixties, early seventies. The Dionysians went away and Apollonian
nerds took over the culture -- you get the Wall Street Yuppie era of the
eighties. Right now, at the end of the century, the culture is a nightmare.

So I'm trying to uphold the sixties -- not just the
progressive political ideas but the visionary insights that were beyond
politics. Bly shares this vision of the cosmos. I want to reunite that, though,
with responsibility to the system and to institutions.

HB: The kind of thing you react against now, the political
correctness of feminism, isn't so new. It started back then. The sixties
generated its own fundamentalism.

CP: Sure. Almost immediately there was a turn toward group
think. The do-your-own thing people were noncombative. They floated off, their
brains were lost to the culture. The fanatical ideologues who emerge almost
immediately in feminism -- they hounded me out, they hounded out a lot of other
people -- took over because they are the ones with endless energy for
meetings. If the ones with the vision had produced art or writing, they would
still have had an impact on the culture. But the attitude was, hey, life is
like a flower, life is like pollen, why exert yourself, the gods will bless us
no matter what.

They made the passage to India, but they never came back.
The point is to go to India and come back to the West with vision and transform
the culture.

HB: You are considered an extremist but in your written work
you try to strike a balance. In "Sexual Personae" it's Apollo and
Dionysus. In "Vamps and Tramps" it's Judeo-Christianity and paganism,
text and the media. You even try to strike a balance in terms of sexuality,
writing "Bisexuality is our best hope of escape from the animosities and
false polarities of the current sex wars."

CP: And a balance between past and future. My phrase is
creative duality.

HB: Is it possible to keep one eye on the great books and
the other on television?

CP: I'm a living embodiment.

HB: What happens to text? To language?

CP: It's shriveling. That's obvious. So what the hell are
these people at Harvard doing, with their stupid labyrinthine language of
post-structuralism? When its under attack by popular culture, language has got
to get livelier. It can't be deadened by false syntax, European jargon, stupid
essays on Madonna, choked semiotics. Reading culture is falling into ruin.

What are you doing, Ivy League? Why force professors of
literature to read Lacan, Derrida, Foucault? We've got to go out there and
preach as though we were ministers, we have to be evangelical to save reading,
or my god, it's going to go.

I've been teaching in very marginal schools where people
don't read and don't buy the books. There's a major crisis on our hands and the
Ivy League is totally irresponsible in approaching these matters. We've got to
sell reading. I embody this, I believe that language should be used in an
sensory and emotional way.

But even if we go enter a period of barbarism where
knowledge is lost, the books will survive. That is another principle of my
work: works are lost and they are recovered, lost and recovered. We are going
through a period now where they are lost -- and the Ivy League has helped to
bury them -- but they are still there. They will be on the library shelf.

HB: You compare today's Unites States to the Roman Empire at
the time when Rome's classical tradition was coming into conflict with its
imperial polyglot culture.

CP: Ethically our culture is split between the old virtues,
like the republican virtues in Rome, and the new imperial fast track style,
which would be the gay world I belong to, drag queens and so on.

And here's the folly of progressives. They don't realize
that the accusations the Christian right makes of decadence is true; the gay
male world is decadent. I acknowledge that. We are in a decadent phase. In
"Sexual Personae" I redefine decadence as a complex historical mode
with specific characteristics. Finally I call myself a decadent, a decadent
lesbian.

HB: Today, there's a complete split between religious and
political fundamentalism on the one hand, and what you call decadence and
others might refer to as postmodernism.

CP: The reason we're talking about fundamentalism is because
modernism assaulted belief without putting anything in its place. When the
Enlightenment, assaulted beliefs it put something else in their place --
science. Romanticism put poetry and art in its place. The fault of modernism is
that it attacks conventional belief without putting anything in its place. The
consequence now, at the end of the century, is a world movement back to
fundamentalism.

That's what I'm trying to warn people about. Instead of
crying, oh, the radical right, they're such fanatics, ask, why are they taking
the people with them? There's a hollowness at the heart of progressive politics
right now.

HB: In "Vamps and Tramps" you write, "the
function of the modern artist is precisely to shatter *all taboos* and that
where the subject of the art work causes the most pain, that is where the
artist is contributing the most to civilization." Why?

CP: That is the function of the artist in the period of
romanticism -- and I think we are still in a two hundred year old era of
romanticism. That's what Harold Bloom would say and what I would say.

That's not the function of the artist through most of world
history. Normally artists uphold and affirm the fundamental beliefs of their
time and their people. The Sistine Chapel was only possible, for example,
because Michelangelo was in total agreement with the principles of his own
people. Since romanticism, the artist, as we all know, has been in opposition
to society. So today, taboo breaking is the road of art.

HB: In your piece about Judy Garland, you write about the
sacred monsters.

CP: The stars, the great artists, are always amoral
egotists. This is what I'm trying to get women to realize. If you hope to
achieve at the highest level of intellect or art or performance then egomania
and amorality are involved. You cannot be Miss Nice Girl and hit the top level.
This is the trouble with women in rock. It's not that women lack creativity. They
have great talent which they have shown in the cello, the piano, the violin, in
vocals and so on, but in hard rock lead guitar, which I adore -- to me it's the
great romantic voice of self-assertion -- women have achieved absolutely
nothing after twenty-five years.

The great stars -- Madonna -- propel their imagination. All
of the great creators are in some sense vampires.

HB: You say "We are greater than our social
selves."

CP: There are two spheres of life. One is social, one
sexual, emotional, spiritual. The part where they overlap is the part where
feminists correctly say the personal is political. But contemporary feminism's
error is to identify all of life with the social sphere. We are much greater
than merely that.

In "Sexual Personae" I'm saying society is a
mechanism, an artifice. Males, in flight from nature, constructed this
civilized shell. It's an artifice and it's frail. I can see that all things
will eventually decay, and all that's left is the great wheel of nature.

The vision of the sixties was about nature. We saw the
artifice of society; we saw social injustice and meant to remedy it. But we
would never, never make the mistake of imagining that the shell of the social
system could be identified with the totality of human existence. We saw the
cosmos behind it. And that perception has been lost. So to even raise the word
"nature" in academe today, in the Ivy League, gets you called a
biological determinist, an "essentialist" -- a stupid word used by
people who don't know anything about the history of philosophy. That should be
the first two years of your college education -- nature and all the varied
definitions of it that every culture has invented.

HB: What is the connection between your literary persona and
your media persona?

CP: Bookstores or radio stations will sometimes say, will
you read from your book? I say absolutely not. I would never read from my book.
The voice of Camille Paglia the person is not the voice of "Sexual
Personae". I never read my writing aloud.

I feel like in some ways I have a speech impediment. I have
always had one. Short, fast-talking people -- it's well known no one takes them
seriously. Leaders are taller and slower spoken. My normal speech has held me
back. Now at least people understand what I'm saying. "Sexual
Personae" is out there, and here comes my third book.

Until my early forties and before any of these books were
out no one understood a word I was saying, not even my friends. I would try to
talk with people about my ideas and it was futile. They'd listen to me, listen
to me, listen to me, and then everyone would say, oh, that's ridiculous. So I
learned to shut up.

So "Sexual Personae" is my inner thoughts. I will
say things when I'm writing that I've never said even to my friends. I have
found an audience. Still, it's weird, it's very weird, the relation between the
writer and the audience.

HB: What are you like as a teacher?

CP: When I first got my first job at Benington College, from
which I was later fired, I had great trouble moving from the total silence of
writing and researching "Sexual Personae" on weekends into talking
mode for the class. Once I start talking I keep talking, but the syntax, I have
no syntax to start with, I have no words. So it's a great discipline to force
yourself to sell these works to freshman over so many years. Trying to
communicate to minds that are completely blank and resistant is a fantastic
exercise.

HB: Why so many references to sadomasochism in your work?

CP: I don't practice sadomasochism but it's one of the
themes I saw neglected in the culture and one I was finding everywhere in art.
This is where "Sexual Personae" was most prophetic. In one of
Michelangelo's statues the pin holding up a breastplate bites into the flesh. I
wrote it was like the "nipple-piercing pins one sees in sadomasochist sex
shops." When I wrote that line, no one would have known what I was talking
about. By the time the book came out in 1990, piercing was a fashion statement.

Sadomasochism is a primary principle of nature. It's
Darwinian -- sex and aggression. These are the elemental forces of nature that
the West or any civilized culture conceals from itself. "Sexual
Personae" begins with :in the beginning with nature. Middle class people
are removed from the operations of nature in a way their ancestors who worked
on farms were not. There's something, it seems to me, ill about this fantastic
complex machinery, the modern world.

I'm doing nothing that people in the sixties were not doing
but it's all gone. There should be other people like me; there should have been
other books like mine. But the context is missing. I seem weird, I seem really
weird. Today, you cannot be successful at the elite schools without being
conformist in a bourgeois way. They don't care about your ideas, they don't
care about your scholarship or your learning. All that matters is that you tow
the line and be a person that can fit in, a company man.

How the sixties have collapsed, how the great boldness of
the sixties has collapsed into such timorous and time-serving kinds of
group-think.